“I’m very sorry about your wife,” he whispered with what seemed like a very proper show of respect, until I realized that we were standing in the middle of the ward, beside the night nurse’s desk, and surrounded by sleeping women who weren’t quite as sick as my wife had been. “We did everything we could, Herr Gunther. But she was really very ill.”
“Flu was it?”
“It seems so.” In the light of the desk lamp he came up very thin, with a round white face and pointy red hair. He looked like a one-man coconut shy.
“Kind of odd, though, wouldn’t you say?” I remarked. “I mean, I haven’t heard of anyone else who’s got the flu.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “we’ve had several cases. There’s a case on the next ward. We’re very concerned that it will spread. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the last serious outbreak of flu, in 1918. And of how many died. You remember that, don’t you?”
“Better than you,” I said.
“For that reason alone,” he said, “the occupation authorities are anxious to contain the possible spread of any infection. Which is why we’d like to seek your permission to order an immediate cremation. In order to prevent the virus from spreading. I appreciate that this is a very difficult time for you, Herr Gunther. Losing your wife at such a young age must be dreadful. I can only guess what you must be going through right now. But we wouldn’t ask for your full cooperation in this matter unless we thought it important.”
He was giving it plenty of choke, as well he needed to after the master class in cold-blooded indifference exhibited by his stiff-necked colleague, Dr. Effner. I let him rev some more, hardly liking to intercept his continuing effusions of sympathy with what I was really thinking, which was that before being a spinner in the Max Planck, Kirsten had been a real blue, always drunk, and before then, something of a slut, especially with the Americans. In Berlin, immediately after the war, I had suspected that she was little more than a snapper, doing it for chocolate and cigarettes. So many others had done the same, of course, although perhaps with a little less obvious enjoyment. Somehow it seemed only appropriate that the Americans should have their way with Kirsten in death. After all, they’d had their way with her often enough while she had been alive. So when the doctor had finished whispering his pitch, I nodded and said, “All right, we’ll play it your way, Doc. If you think it’s really necessary.”
“Well, it’s not so much me as the Amis,” he said. “After what happened in 1918, they’re really worried about an epidemic in the city.”
I sighed. “When do you want to do it?”
“As soon as possible,” he said. “That is, immediately. If you don’t mind.”
“I’d like to see her first,” I said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said. “But try not to touch her, okay? Just in case.” He found me a surgical mask. “You’d better wear this,” he added. “We’ve already opened the windows to help air the room, but there’s no point in taking any risks.”
NINE
The next day I traveled out to Dachau to see Kirsten’s family lawyer and give him the news. Krumper had been handling the sale of the hotel, but so far without success. It seemed that nobody wanted to buy a hotel in Dachau any more than he wanted to stay in one. Krumper’s offices were above the marketplace. From the window behind his desk there was a fine view of St. Jakob’s and the town hall and the fountain in front of the town hall that always put me in mind of a urinal. His office was very like a building site except that there were piles of files and books on the floor instead of bricks and planks.
Krumper was bound to a wheelchair because of a hip injury he had received during one of Munich’s many air raids. Monocled and grouchy, with a cartoon voice and a pipe to match, he was shabby but competent. I liked him in spite of the fact that he had been born in Dachau and lived there all his life without ever having thought to inquire what was happening east of the town. Or so he said. He was very sorry to hear the news of Kirsten’s death. Lawyers are always sorry to lose a good client. I waited for the expressions of sympathy to subside and then asked if he thought I should drop the price of the hotel.
“I don’t think so,” he said carefully. “I’m sure somebody will buy it, although perhaps not as a hotel. As a matter of fact there was a woman here just yesterday asking about the place. She had some questions I wasn’t able to answer, and I took the liberty of giving her your business card. I hope that was all right, Herr Gunther.”
“Did she have a name?”
“She said her name was Frau Schmidt.” He put aside his pipe, flipped open the cigarette box on his desk, and invited me to take one. I lit us both as he continued. “A good-looking woman. Tall. Very tall. With three little scars on the side of her face. Shrapnel scars probably. Not that she seemed at all self-conscious of them. Most women would have grown their hair a bit so that you wouldn’t notice. Not her, though. And not that it really spoiled her looks at all. But then it’s not every woman who would feel confident of that, is it?”
Krumper had just described the woman who had turned up at my office the previous evening. And I had an idea that she wasn’t interested in buying a hotel.
“No indeed,” I said. “Maybe she’s in a dueling society, like the Teutonia Club. Bragging scars to make her more attractive to some lout with a rapier in his hand. What was that crap the kaiser used to say about those old clubs? The best education a young man can get for his future life.”
“You paint a very vivid picture, Herr Gunther,” said Krumper, fingering a small scar on his cheekbone as if he, too, had enjoyed the kind of education favored by the kaiser. For a moment or two he was silent, opening a file that lay on his overcrowded desk. “Your wife left a will,” he said. “Leaving everything to her father. She hadn’t made a new will since his death. But as her next of kin you inherit everything anyway. The hotel. A few hundred marks. Some pictures. And a car.”
“A car?” This was news to me. “Kirsten owned a car?”
“Her father’s. He kept it hidden throughout the war.”
“I think he was probably quite good at keeping things hidden,” I said, thinking of the box his SS friend had buried in the garden. I was certain he must have known about it, contrary to what the American who dug it up had believed.
“In a garage on Donauwörther Landstrasse.”
“You mean that old Fulda tire place on the road to Kleinberghofen?” Krumper nodded. “What kind of a car?”
“I don’t know much about cars,” said Krumper. “I saw him in it before the war. Very proud of it, he was. Some sort of duo-tone cabriolet. Of course, business was better then and he could afford to run it. At the beginning of the war he even buried the wheels to stop anyone requisitioning it.” Krumper handed me a set of car keys. “And I know he looked after it, even though he didn’t drive it. I’m sure it will be in good running order.”
A few hours later I was driving back to Munich in a handsome-looking two-door Hansa 1700 that looked as good as it had the day it left the Goliath works in Bremen. I went straight to the hospital, collected Kirsten’s ashes, and then drove all the way back to Dachau and the Leitenberg Cemetery, where I had arranged to meet the local undertaker, Herr Gartner. I handed over her cremains and arranged for a short service of remembrance the following afternoon.
When I got back to my apartment in Schwabing, I tried some of the anesthetic again. This time it didn’t work. I felt as lonely as a fish in a toilet bowl. I had no relations and no friends to speak of other than the guy in the bathroom mirror, who used to say hello in the morning. Lately even he had stopped speaking to me and seemed, more often than not, to greet me with a sneer, as if I had become obnoxious to him. Maybe we had all become obnoxious. All of us Germans. There were none of us the Americans looked at with anything other than quiet contempt, except perhaps the party-girls and the snappers. And you didn’t need to be Hanussen the clairvoyant to read the minds of our new friends and protectors. How could you let it happen? they asked. How could you do what you did? It’s a question I had often asked myself. I didn’t have an answer. I don’t think any of us will ever have an answer. What possible answer could there ever be? It was just something that happened in Germany once, about a thousand years ago.
TEN
About a week later she came back. The tall one. Tall women are always better than short ones, especially the kind of tall women that short men seem to favor, who really aren’t that tall, they just seem that way. This one wasn’t quite as tall as the hoop on a basketball court, but a lot of her was just hair and a hat and high heels and hauteur. She had plenty of that. She looked as if she needed help as much as Venice needed rain. That’s something I appreciate in a client. I enjoy being pitched at by someone who’s not used to words like “please” and “thank you.” It brings out the ’forty-eighter in me. Sometimes even the Spartacist.
“I need your help, Herr Gunther,” she said, sitting down very carefully on the edge of my creaking green leather sofa. She kept hold of her briefcase for a moment, hugging it to her ample chest like a breastplate.
“Oh? What makes you think so?”
“You’re a private detective, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but why me? Why not use Preysings in Frauenstrasse? Or Klenze on Augustinerstrasse? They’re both bigger than me.”
She looked taken aback, as if I’d asked what color underwear she had on. I smiled encouragingly and told myself that so long as she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, I would just have to guess.
“What I’m trying to find out, Fräulein, is if someone recommended me. In this business, it’s the sort of thing you like to know.”
“Not Fräulein. It’s Frau Warzok. Britta Warzok. And yes, you were recommended to me.”
“Oh? By whom?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say.”
“But you were the lady who turned up at Herr Krumper’s last week. My lawyer. Asking about my hotel? Only you were calling yourself Schmidt then, I believe.”
“Yes. Not very original of me, I know. But I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hire you or not. I had been here a couple of times and you were out and I didn’t care to leave a message in your mailbox. The concierge said that he thought you owned a hotel in Dachau. I thought I might find you there. I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign and then I went to Krumper’s office.”
Some of that might have been true, but I let it go, for now. I was enjoying her discomfort and her elegant long legs too much to scare her off. But I didn’t see any harm in teasing her a little.
“And yet when you came in here the other night,” I said, “you said you’d made a mistake.”
“I changed my mind,” she said. “That’s all.”
“You changed it once, you could do it again. Leave me out on a limb. In this business that can be awkward. I need to know that you’re committed to this, Frau Warzok. It won’t be like buying a hat. Once an investigation is under way it’s not something you can return. You won’t be able to take it back to the shop and say you don’t like it.”
“I’m not an idiot, Herr Gunther,” she said. “And please don’t speak to me as if I haven’t given any thought to what I’m doing. It wasn’t easy coming here. You’ve no idea how difficult this is. If you did you might be a little less patronizing.” She spoke coolly and without emotion. “Is it the hat? I can take the hat off if it bothers you.” Finally she let go of her briefcase, placing it on the floor by her feet.
“I like the hat.” I smiled. “Please, keep it on. And I’m sorry if my manner offends you. But to be frank, there are a lot of time-wasters in this business and my time is precious to me. I’m a one-man operation, and if I’m working for you I can’t be working for someone else. Someone whose need might conceivably be greater than yours, perhaps. That’s just how it is.”
“I doubt there is anyone who needs you more than I do, Herr Gunther,” she said, with just enough tremor in her voice to tug at the softer end of my aorta. I offered her a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke,” she said, shaking her head. “My . . . doctor says they’re bad for you.”
“I know. But the way I figure it, they’re one of the more elegant ways to kill yourself. What’s more, they give you plenty of time to put your affairs in order.” I lit my cigarette and gulped down a mouthful of smoke. “Now, what seems to be the trouble, Frau Warzok?”
“You sound like you mean that,” she said. “About killing yourself.”
“I was on the Russian front, lady. After something like that, every day seems like a bonus.” I shrugged. “So eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we might get invaded by the Ivans, and then we’ll wish we were dead even if we’re not, although of course we will be, because this is an atomic world we live in now and it takes just six minutes not six years to kill six million people.” I pinched the cigarette from between my lips and grinned at her. “So what’s a few smokes beside a mushroom cloud?”
“You’ve been through it, then?”
“Sure. We’ve all been through it.” I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. The little piece of black fishnet on the side of her hat was covering the three scars on her cheek. “You, too, by the look of things.”
She touched her face. “Actually, I was quite lucky,” she said.
“That’s the only way to look at it.”
“There was an air raid on the twenty-fifth of April 1944,” she said. “They say that forty-five high-explosive and five thousand incendiary bombs fell on Munich. One of the bombs shattered a water pipe in my house. I got hit by three red-hot copper rings that were blown off my boiler. But it could just as easily have been my eyes. It’s amazing what we can come through, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
“Herr Gunther, I want to get married.”
“Isn’t this a little sudden, dear? We’ve only just met.”
She smiled politely. “There’s just one problem. I don’t know if the man I married is still alive.”
“If he disappeared during the war, Frau Warzok,” I said, “you would be better off inquiring about him at the Army Information Office. The Wehrmacht Dienststelle is in Berlin, at 179 Eichborndamm. Telephone 41904.”